Borges Architectural Group in Roseville designed the wireless communications for Levi's Stadium, which is now the most connected sports facility in the country.

The $1.2 billion stadium, its parking lot and parking garage are all Wi-Fi hot spots and covered by numerous cell antennas, said Adam Lovern, vice president with Borges.

The 68,500-seat stadium has more than 1,000 access points for Wi-Fi and the cellular capacity for nearly all the people in the stadium to be on their phones, laptops, tablets or smart devices at the same time.

The “distributed antenna system” is also low power, so it isn’t throwing strong radio frequency waves through everything.

Connectivity runs through the entire stadium, and also in its fantasy football league lounge, Lovern said. “You know everyone in there is going to be on a device.”

Making the entire stadium into a Wi-Fi hot spot takes a lot more than just putting antennas and routers in the design. Access points, radio transmitters and cell antennas are located through the entire project, and they are connected via fiber optic cable to a 5,000-square-foot communications center filled with routers, radios and fiber-optic patch panels. That room is basically a data center. It is served by a 120-ton air conditioning system. The system does not weigh 120 tons, rather it is a rating of how much heat the system can remove in an hour. A typical 1,500-square foot house, for example, house has a 2-ton system.

Borges worked as a designer of the system for Das Group Professionals of Walnut Creek. The San Francisco 49ers own the equipment, as opposed to the carriers owning it and leasing it to the team. The stadium is carrier-neutral, so it has connections to AT&T, Verizon and other networks, all of which have slightly — or some times dramatically — different specifications, which also has to be designed into the antenna system, Lovern said.

Borges was founded in 1984, and it for many years did three separate fields: architecture, planning and interiors.

It added wireless telecommunications work in 2009 when the economy tanked. Borges started by designing cell sites and cell towers. Those projects require an architect and a building permit, so it was an easy add for the firm, and it turned out to be a lifeline as other work dried up.

“We approach projects like an architectural firm, and not like a telecommunications company. The carriers know what they are doing with the equipment, but they just want to put a box on the building,” he said. “We are more interested in maintaining the integrity of the design.”

That has been a successful approach for Borges. In some months, wireless work can account for 50 percent of billings, Lovern said. The firm has 30 employees. He declined to say how much the Levi’s contract was worth.

Four years ago, Borges built the distributed antenna system in SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. It also did the retrofit of Wi-Fi at Candlestick Park. Borges is is now working on a $50 million contract to design an outdoor distributed antenna system on 28 Bay Area Rapid Transit stations.

“This has turned out to be a good business for us,” Lovern said. “This is not a line of work that is going to be going away any time soon.”

The need for connectivity is growing in public places. The Sacramento Kings say their new downtown arena will have the strongest Wi-Fi connectivity of any sports arena in the country.